http://www.jewishworldreview.com --
IT SOUNDS like a typical, albeit wrenching, custody battle. When Brooks
Brann moved out of Patti Dalby's Newport Beach, California home last year,
Dalby kept both the "kids." Today, the two siblings, a boy and girl,
continue to play together quite amicably, even as their "parents" fight like
cat and dog.

Brann has sued Dalby for custody of his "son," plus compensation for loss of
companionship. The "daughter" was Dalby's before she met Brooks Brann. But
Dalby says both kids should remain with her because they do best together.

On December 12, an Orange County, California court is expected to
adjudicate this nasty dispute, primarily through determining the boy's best
interest. Sounds logical, except that the "boy" in question is actually a
Rottweiler dog named Guinness. Roxie, the girl, is also a Rottweiler. Not
long ago, this kind of case would have been laughed out of any court.

Enter Stephen Wise and other leaders of the burgeoning movement for
so-called"pet owner rights." Over the last decade, this new breed of
lawyers, some ideological soul mates of the animal rights movement, others
just shrewd businessmen who undoubtedly salivate over their huge and
lucrative potential clientele (61 million-pet owning households, according to
USA Today) , have convinced courts to accord pets quasi-human status. Thus
the California court must consider the dog's best interest, as a New York
state court did in a similar "custody" battle recently. That's right: how
do broken homes affect the house broken set?

All this quite literally turns hundreds of years of common law on its head.
Most pets are certainly lovable and virtually "members of the family" or
"canine family members" to use PC parlance. But sorry, Fido, to the law you
are technically nothing but an armchair. Under common law that dates to
antiquity pets are virtually indistinguishable from any other form of
property. Veterinarians could only be sued for the monetary value of their
"patients" and municipalities had wide latitude to seize and euthanize
"vicious" dogs who had maimed or mauled.

Today, however, pet owner rights lawyers file seemingly endless appeals-and
even use character witnesses--to keep municipalities from exercising their
long-established right to "put down" certifiably "vicious" dogs. The same
"creative" lawyering forces vets to pay unprecedented damage awards to
settle what are essentially malpractice lawsuits. Like so many other
permutations of the rights revolution, this one has a cultural context.

MORAL RELATIVISM:
There is no such thing as a bad dog; only a "good dog having a bad day" to
use Steven Wise's description of a "client" who mauled a Lincoln,
Massachusetts resident.

BETTER YALE THAN JAIL.
"Pet incidents can only be reduced and the general public be better protected
[through]education, not legislation," argues Adrianne Lefkowitz of the
American Dog Owners Association. "It is commonly understood that socializatio
n and understanding of behavior is the best way to not only make a community
safer regarding the pets we share them with, but to make our pets better
companions and less likely to wind up in the shelter.

PSYCHOBABBLE:
Nicholas Dodman, author of Dogs Behaving Badly, explains that dogs who bite
small children aren't necessarily vicious. Instead, they are afflicted with
"interspecies dyslexia" --ie, an inability to differentiate between genuine
threats and humans who are harmless, or from the dog perspective, "pink and
ouchy."

LENIENCY FOR CRIMINALS:
If you're tough on crime that only breed more crime. American Dog Owners
Association lawyer Marshall Tanick has contended that laws against pit bulls
are problematic because they could exacerbate the pooch's "anti-social"
tendencies.

UNDERSTANDING THE CRIMINAL AND HIS "RAGE."
In New Jersey, authorities are required to consider whether a dog was
provoked before attacked. New York City has a similar measure on the books.
That's right; "canine rage" is an acceptable legal defense.

DYSFUNCTIONAL FAMILY:
"The breed of the dog is not the problem," the ASPCA contends, "the behavior
of the owner is." Pit bulls, German Shepherds and Rotweillers get a bad rap
because they tend to attract abusive owners, argues lawyer Karen Copeland.

RACISM:
In an argument redolent of feminists insistence that differences between men
and women are merely "social constructs," the 'pet owner rights" movements
says impossible to make meaningful distinctions between species, or even tell
them apart. When the American Kennel Club in 1998 listed certain dogs as
"not good" for children, defenders of the ostracized species went ballistic.
"To say that all these dogs are 'this' and these dogs are 'that,' that's
racism, canine racism," yelped Carl Holder of the Daschund Club of America.

And so on.

Still, like so many areas of American life, in the realm of pet owner rights,
the trump card is race. Everywhere from Florida to Minneapolis, courts have
declared stuck down breed specific bans or restrictive measures as
unconstitutionally vague. In New York City, where pit bull alone have
accounted for 80 bite incidents per month, two successive mayors have been
stymied in efforts to give strengthen the Big Apple's dangerous dog law.

Veterinarians also have another reason to worry when "Cujo" bears his teeth.
Damage awards, just $300 in the early 1990s, have skyrocketed to five
figures. This April, a Costa Mesa, California woman whose Rottweiller cried
continually after botched dental work won a $20,000 judgment against the vet.

Sounds like some folks are hitting the jackpot in the litigation lottery.
But the end result could be much misery for pets and their owners. Vets worry
that the litigation explosion is likely to force a dramatic increase in their
insurance rates, which today is dirty cheap at around $200. If present trends
continue, however, increased premiums would force them to pass the cost along
to owners. That could make some services too expensive for some.

Ultimately, the "pet owner rights'' movement is, despite its name,
inimical to property rights. The new rights supposedly accorded to our furry
friends further fuels the litigation explosion. And further emboldens
left-wing advocates who would infringe upon the generally legitimate rights
of government and individual property holders. The Animal Legal Defense
Fund, which boasts a network of some 500 lawyers nationwide, is supporting
legislation in Pennsylvania that would make it a crime to leave a pet alone
in the car while the owner is out of sight. Can you still have Fido fetch
your slippers?

Perhaps not for long. In his new book Rattling the Cage, Wise, an adjunct
professor at Harvard Law School, delineates his ambitious goal to "break
down" the legal "wall of separation" between animal and man. Sounds absurd.
Still, given recent developments, cynics would be mistaken to assume that
Wise and Co. are barking up the wrong tree.

If you thought Kramer vs. Kramer (the 1978 film about a contentious custody
battle) was a tearjerker look out for
"Fido vs. Fido."

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